Big Shows Fire Departments Ensured Safety

Carnival Shows Had Their Own Fire Department

Some of the bigger carnival sows had their own fire department.

It was important that fires be brought under control quickly to keep from spreading on a tight midway.

The local fire trucks, especially coming from a volunteer fire company, could take as long as 15 minutes to assemble their crew and vehicles and be at an outlying fairgrounds. By that time an entire show could become engulfed in flames.

Sawdust on a midway and dry grass underfoot were perfect fuel for a carelessly tossed cigarette and canvas wasn’t fire proofed as is today.

A small spark from a Gilly Wired light stringer could bloom into a devastating inferno that would swallow an entire joint line or consume a ride like the Scooters or Merry Go Round.

This photo shows the Strates Show fire truck in 1952. It’s obviously made from an old Army surplus W.W.II “Deuce and a Half”.

1893 Chicago World’s Fair

The Temporary City

I’m continually amazed at the history of the World’s Columbian Exposition’s “White City”or Chicago Worlds Fair of 1893 because it was the beginning of all carnival related enterprises here in America. Without it’s inception it’s possible there would have been no carnival midways here or anywhere . . . Unimaginable !

Did you know that Most of the buildings of the fair were designed in the neo-classical style of architecture but constructed of lathe and plaster and made to be torn down after only a few months when the fair was over?

The area at the Court of Honor was known as The White City. The buildings were clad in white stucco, which, in comparison to the tenements of Chicago, seemed illuminated. It was also called the White City because of the extensive use of street lights, which made the boulevards and buildings usable at night.

The exposition itself was huge, it covered more than 600 acres on what had been a swampy piece of land of little value to the city.

The Midway Plaisance, where all the carnival action was and extending west from Jackson Park, once formed the southern boundary of the University of Chicago, which was being built as the fair was closing (the university has since developed south of the Midway). The university’s football team, the Maroons, were the original “Monsters of the Midway”. The exposition is mentioned in the university’s alma mater: “The City White hath fled the earth,/But where the azure waters lie,/A nobler city hath its birth,/The City Gray that ne’er shall die.”

Almost all of the fair’s structures were designed to be temporary; of the more than 200 buildings erected for the fair, the only two which still stand in place are the Palace of Fine Arts and the World’s Congress Auxiliary Building. From the time the fair closed until 1920, the Palace of Fine Arts housed the Field Columbian Museum (now the Field Museum of Natural History, since relocated); in 1933, the Palace building re-opened as the wonderful Museum of Science and Industry. The second building, the World’s Congress Building, was one of the few buildings not built in Jackson Park, instead it was built downtown in Grant Park.

The cost of construction of the World’s Congress Building was shared with the Art Institute of Chicago, which, as planned, moved into the building (the museum’s current home) after the close of the fair.

Three other significant buildings survived the fair. The first is the Norway pavilion, a recreation of a traditional wooden stave church which is now preserved at a museum called Little Norway in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin. The second is the Maine State Building, designed by Charles Sumner Frost, which was purchased by the Ricker family of Poland Spring, Maine. They moved the building to their resort to serve as a library and art gallery. The Poland Spring Preservation Society now owns the building, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. The third is the Dutch House, which was moved to Brookline, Massachusetts.

The main altar at St. John Cantius in Chicago, as well as its matching two side altars, are reputed to be from the World’s Columbian Exposition’s “White City”.

Crafts 20 Big Shows Legacy Comes To An End

In the early 1960’s, after the death of Orville Craft, the once great ‘Crafts 20 Big Shows’ finally went to auction. The winter quarters property, in North Hollywood California, had become so valuable that it was worth far more than the show had ever been despite the shows size ( 3 big midway units)

By the time the auctioneers gavel had fallen the West Coast Shows had purchased most of the equipment. Like most carnivals during their declining years, the show had become mostly outdated junk. Many of the old ride trailers, which were actually wagons, had been purchased from a defunct railroad show and discovered to be 9 feet wide ( they were made before there were any highway restrictions on load limits ) and had to be scrapped.

The West Coast Shows made a Crafts Unit out of the best of the stuff but many of the old rides, which had set idle in winter quarters for years, could no longer pass modern California inspection standards and were sold off to out of state shows with the worst of the equipment sold to Mexico and the rest scrapped.

The old 1940’s and early 50’s trucks you see lined up were the mainstay of the Crafts Show fleet. Having driven some of them in my early years I can assure you that they were just as miserable to drive as they look but they did the job over the notorious high California mountain passes for many years (although 45 miles an hour was considered a blazing speed. Brakes were considered optional ) A couple of these were old, hard rubber tired chain drive Macks that had to be driven over Southern California’s infamous “Grapevine” mountain pass between N.Hollywood and Madeira ( West Coast Shows winter quarters ). Their average speed was between 15 and 20 miles per hour and they had to be pulled over several times on the 120 mile trip to lubricate the drive chain.

The show can be seen in some old classic movies, including Elvis Presley in Roustabout, Strangers On A Train, with its famous Merry-Go-Round scene and Some Came Running which starred Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Shirley McClain filmed in 1958.

The Way It Was On The Midways Of The Past

A Look Back At The Carnival Midway . . .

Retrace The Rich History of The Carnival

I’m often asked by museum patrons how the business has changed…to compare today’s midways with the midways of the past. I guess the most obvious comparison is the logistics.

Many jobs on a carnival don’t even exist anymore. For example, as kids we used to pick up spending money on setup day digging donniker holes for a buck apiece. These days, with our sophisticated and computerized, self contained, self leveling R.V’s with the automatic hydraulic slide outs, only a few showpeople have ever even seen a donniker hole much less had to dig one.

Midways of the past had searchlight operators who manned the white hot, carbon arc lights despite the clouds of biting, swarming insects and intense heat on those sweltering summer nights.

White shirted waiters in bow-ties hustled about through the sawdust covered grass inside the big Indiana Style Cook House tops with trays of hot food and drinks and the Bingo crews swept the counters under the big well flashed canvas tents.

There were mechanical Horse Racing Derbies and Electric Pinball Arcades, Monkey Speedways, Midget shows and Motor Dromes.
Midways of the past had a mechanics wagon where a full time crew of mechanics kept the gasoline powered trucks and tractors running, tires changed and the 4 cylinder gasoline engines that powered the rides rebuilt.

There was a full time electrical department, not a part time electrician/ride operator, manned the generators, fixed the lights and pulled the wire that lit up the show.

All the rides and shows had ticket boxes with show people, usually ride men’s wives, employed as ticket sellers.
Some shows had a big top crew for the massive canvas top that they rented out to the fairs as an exhibit tent. All the big girl shows and side shows had canvas crews that were separate from the performers.

Until the 1940’s all shows had at least one big uniformed band that played an opening concert at the front gate then broke off in sections to work the bally on the different shows up and down the midways of the past.

There was a trainmaster and a train crew who worked tirelessly through the night to keep the train’s departure strictly to the rail roads tight schedule while maintaining the rail cars and wagons during the rest of the week. They insured the train ran smoothly and without incident over the long jump. Sleeping car porters worked daily behind the scenes keeping the shows Pullman cars clean and bed linens fresh.

An advance team that included a general agent went out ahead of the show to hang paper, schedule newspaper and radio advertising and mark the routes or, in the case of train shows, schedule the trains over the different, individual railroads tracks.

Every ride had a crew of at least 3 men and some had 5.and that was before ‘Spectaculars’ were even invented.

Midways of the past had job descriptions like Cat Skinner, Wagon Poler, Fixer and Hod Man have now long disappeared from the midway lexicon as well as the jobs they performed. They started disappearing in the 1950’s and by the end of the 1970’s they were pretty much all but a distant memory. Economic prudence dictated that we tighten up our labor force and streamline our bottom line in the name of financial efficiency.

We modernized, became sophisticated and legitimate and anything that didn’t return a certain profit percentage margin was cast off. We adapted to the changes in our society because we had to, to survive. After all, show people are very good at surviving. But in doing so we lost much of who and what we were along the way. Carnivals are no longer the midways of the past society of lifetime showmen they once were.

We are now a modern business of theme park wannabes with employees who don’t even speak English much less care about our rich and colorful history. We’re a mobile society of imported rides and inventive food and those games that have managed to survive the changes in the ever changing laws. And all of it is tied to the Interstate Highway system by an electronic G P S umbilical cord and loaded in trucks with automatic transmissions so that we don’t even have to learn how to shift the gears anymore.
I suppose there are plenty of folks who will say:”But all these modern things that have come along make our lives easier, faster, better”… and they’re right in their thinking too, but somehow . . .well . . . it just isn’t the same thing . . . and it never will be again.

American Railroad history with the Carnival and Circus

Factual History of The Old Rail Road Carnival and Circus

The American circus is older than the country itself. The first circus troupe of record dates back to 1724 when a small troupe gave its first performance in an open arena outside of Philadelphia.

The first complete circus performance is generally ascribed to John Bill Rickets who built an amphitheater in Philadelphia and gave his first performance on April 3, 1793.

President George Washington was an avid circus fan and attended Rickets’ Show on April 23 and 24, 1793.

By the early 1820’s there were approximately thirty animal circuses touring the eastern United States. These shows moved at night by wagon, over country roads, often mired in mud.

During the heyday of the railroad circus, these shows would become known as “Mud Shows” for obvious reasons. There had been an occasional attempt at railroading by a few of the early shows, but most went back to the wagons and country roads after only one season.

Eventually, the term, “railroad show,” became synonymous with large circuses and carnivals. In the early years, people began to think that if a circus or carnival traveled by rail, it had to be modern and big.

The Great Jackson Shootout

The Shootout in “Bloody Breathitt” County Kentucky

By Doc Rivera:

I was on L.D Wheeler’s Shows, playing the mountainous coal mining country along the Big Sandy River in Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia back in the 1970‘s.

Trying to scrape out a buck in towns like Hazard, Pineville and Matewan was no easy feat. Matewan was where the Hatfield’s and McCoy’s had perpetuated their infamous deadly feud for decades and the offspring of those families still lived there together observing an uneasy truce.

These were not “cream cheese” marks, these were tough, hard and suspicious hill people who viewed “outsiders“ with a jaundiced eye.

One of the most infamous towns in this part of eastern Kentucky was a forgotten little hamlet named Jackson.

Located in what was known as “Bloody Breathitt County“, the town and the people who lived in the surrounding area there had such a rancid reputation that their high school sports teams had to play all ‘away’ games because, in the past, if the Jackson team lost in a home game, the opposing teams buses had been burned and their players physically attacked.

Because of this black reputation, no carnival had played the town in years.

Memories On The Carnival Midway

Share Your Jackpots!

This page is for those who chase Ferris Wheels in the summer sun across this great land of ours. It’s for sharing great jackpots, bits of history and personal reflections. It is always wonderful to be able to share your stories too. They keep our rich and colorful history alive and entertaining.

Be sure to send in your stories by emailing me your contributions and after I’ll review it, andget it up here A S A P for everyone to enjoy.

Midway Slideshow

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Hrubetz is generally credited with inventing the venerable Paratrooper ride.This ride today is considered a staple on most midways in America sharing the spotlight with such consistent old favorites as the Tilt-A-Whirl and Merry-Go-Round. The ride was, in many ways, basically an improvement over the previously designed "Spitfire" which had bulkier, airplane style tubs and took up more truck and wagon space and was harder to set up and move. However, in the context of: "everything old is new again," I submit a photo of one of the first Paratrooper style rides, which you can see was invented far earlier, probably in the early 1920's. ... See MoreSee Less

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